Page 84 of Unsteady

My son. My son. My son.

It plays again, like that permanent scratch on a record, a glitch in my memory that brings an immediate headache. I try to play Sadie’s songs in my head, looping the Oasis song again and again.

Still, I can't get the goddamn words out.

“I’m not okay,” I shove through my lips.

“Vchistuyu,” he whispers, a sad smile stretching across his face. It’s a word I don’t recognize from my partial, limited Russian.

“I don’t know that.” I shake my head, my throat catching.

“Finally.” He smiles but it’s watery. Between him and my mother, the intensity of emotions in this house has always been welcoming. After the hit, it was stifling. Now… now it is starting to feel likehomeagain. “It meansfinally, Rhys. You’re going to tell me what’s going on now. What is hurting you?”

My brow furrows as I look up at him. “How did you—”

“I know I am not your mother.” He raises his hand to silence my protests. “But along with her, you are the most important thing in my life. I would bleed myself dry if it meant I could take your pain for you. Now, tell me.”

So I do. Working all out of order, because I know what is going to be hardest to say.

I tell him of the panic attacks at night, the night terrors that Mom had to shake me awake from multiple times. I tell him about starting the sleeping pills prescribed to me, how it made me lose memory, or how one minute I’d be in the kitchen making lunch, and then suddenly I’d drive nearly to the harbor—that it scared me enough to stop taking them and just deal with the nightmares.

I’m honest when he asks if I still have them. I do.

I tell him about the panic attacks on the ice when I first started back, and his face looks distraught with the details. I know it’s because I didn’t ask for his help, that he knows I was hurting and scared and alone—only I wasn’t alone. So, I tell him that too, about Sadie and her music and everything else about her that brings me some kind of peace.

He smiles at that, his eyes wet as he stays silent and lets me get it all out.

And then, I tell him why this is the first time he’s heard it.

“In the hospital,” I begin, looking at my hands splayed on the oak. “I couldn’t really see anything or remember much that I could. But I could hear you, over everyone that was there, I kept hearing you.”

I could still smell that harsh antiseptic mixed with metal, my hands trying to pat down and rub at my unseeing eyes, when a nurse had to hold them down. My mother was crying; I could just faintly tell because the loudest noise was my father’s sobbing yells.

My son! My son—help him. Please.

And then,I can’t live without him. Not my son—he can’t do this to me.

It wasn’t some grand hurtful thing, and it would take more than two sessions of therapy to understand it, but his screams haunted me. I’d never seen my dad upset or afraid before. And when I was at my highest point of fear, the calm, steady presence of my father wasn’t there—just panic.

So, I keep everything to myself. Because I love my dad, and I never want to hear him like that again.

I tell him all of this before I work up the courage to look at him.

His eyes, so like my own, are shining as tears drop down his face.

And then, he’s moving, his arms around me before I can blink, trapping me to my seat in a fierce hug.

“My son,” he whispers into my hair, and this time there isn’t a bolt of fear or panic that rushes my spine. Just warmth. “I’m so sorry, Rhys.Prosti menya, pozhaluysta.” Forgive me, please.

“You didn’t do anything—”

“I did,” he says, holding me somehow tighter, before letting go and settling back into his seat. The lump in my throat is still there, hard enough to swallow through, so I don’t reach for the coffee that I desperately want. “I should have been there, should have stepped back to see what it was you needed. But seeing you like that, the blood on the ice, the way your body gave out—”

I stop him with a hand and he nods.

“It’s still too hard to think about it. Makes my head swim.”

“Because you can’t remember it?”

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